The theory is that people stop doing all the other household, energy-sucking, activities, like laundry, during the game, and they also congregate in one space, leaving lights off throughout the rest of the home. People also attend Super Bowl parties at each other’s homes, leaving their own homes powered down. Last year the Super Bowl saved the homeowners a collective three million dollars in energy costs.

That’s all very interesting, but how does that help you save money on your energy bill?

(Read More: Why Cold Weather Super Bowl Could Be a Financial Boon)

“What Opower does is we work with utilities across the globe to take boring energy data and turn it into interesting insights into people’s energy usage and use those insights to communicate to consumers and to change their behavior,” says Alex Laskey, president and founder of Opower.

(Read more: For Super Bowl Ads, It’s Go Viral or Go Home)

Opower works with 83 utilities, helping their 50 million customers save money on their home energy bills. They say they will help Americans save over $200 million in the next twelve months, about half of what the solar energy industry saves U.S. homeowners each year. Laskey describes how:

“So instead of a bill that comes at the end of the month that is frustrating and confusing because it’s high, and it’s too late to do anything about it, you get a proactive alert that might come in text message or a phone call. It says, you know what, it’s only a week into the month, but you’re on track for a bill that’s 40 percent higher than your typical bill, and here are the things you ought to do to make sure you don’t have the high of a bill at the end of the month.”

Customers will never know these insights come from Opower, because the utilities paying for the information brand it as their own. Whatever the messenger, the message is simple: Studying consumer behavior can help change consumer behavior. That is more important than ever as technology increasingly drives society.

Social media, as much as it connects us ideologically, separates us physically. Just knowing that when we do get together physically, for an event like the Super Bowl or otherwise, we are saving energy, might just change some of our behavior going forward.

Every little bit helps the planet.

(Read more: 12 Unusual Super Bowl Bets)

Article source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100427313

In the latest report by RootMetrics, which measures mobile performance, ATT came out ahead of Verizon for overall data speeds and beat Verizon for how fast consumers can download their emails and other data. Verizon was quicker when it came to uploading data.

The report found that Sprint had the worst data speeds. In 61 percent to 76 percent of its tests, Sprint recorded download and upload speeds below 1.5 Mbps. Conversely, ATT, T-Mobile and Verizon recorded download speeds of 5 Mbps in almost 70 percent of its tests.

Meanwhile, Verizon dropped the smallest percentage of calls (less than 1 percent) and Metro PCS dropped the most. Verizon was also the fastest in sending text messages. Sprint was the slowest.

The combined scores of each of the top five carriers measured: Verizon 92; ATT 90; T-Mobile 70; MetroPCS 56; Sprint 49.

Article source: http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2012/08/10/verizon-gets-top-marks-for-phone-and-data-service/